Telegraph Sport's Mark Reason explains why he believes the rugby field
has become "far too dangerous a place" for his 10-year-old son. Have your
say.

Call me a wuss, call me an over-protective parent, call me a hypocrite, but I don't want my son to play rugby. Like most 10-year-olds, Callum loves a bit of biff, but for now the only place that he will get a good ruck is in the school playground. The rugby field has become a far too dangerous place.

Almost any responsible school coach will tell you that the older boys are now smacking into each other with the sort of force that would land them in an institute for juvenile delinquents if they tried it on the street. Rugby was always a hard game, but it was never this violent.

Nigel Baker, the coach of Ely under-16s, tells me that they had a match recently against a club that was missing five of its first-choice team. They were out with injuries that ranged from a crushed pelvis, broken arm, broken leg to twisted knee ligaments. This was just three games into the new season.

Baker said: "The authorities have to control the tackle so that it's more about putting someone on the ground than taking him out physically."

At the moment, the 'hit' is king. The great Samoan wing Brian Lima was known as 'the chiropractor' because he 'rearranged the bones of the opposition players' when he hit them in the tackle.

On Sunday night I was watching a game of American Football – the sport beloved of the England rugby union manager, Martin Johnson – between the Dallas Cowboys and Atlanta Falcons. After tuning in late the first 'tackle' I saw was a Cowboy smashing his helmet into the helmet of an unsuspecting receiver.

The next receiver to catch a ball was smashed in the upper chest and neck by a shoulder hit. As he went down his head was juddering like a spring-loaded nodding dog. The studio analyst said: "These guys are way into smacking. He just gave up the goods. That's what you teach as a defensive-backs coach, to put the fear into the heart of the offensive player."

Anyone who has watched Premiership rugby this season will recognise the scene. Just as it came into American football, violent intimidation is an increasing part of rugby.

The tackle has been replaced by the collision and the crowd bay like Roman groupies. But a world of trouble lies ahead. In the NFL, broken players are looking into suing their former clubs for not protecting them properly and the same thing will happen in rugby.

Two recent pieces of research show that rugby is less than half as dangerous as American Football in terms of catastrophic spinal injuries at just under one person per 100,000 per year, but the most common cause of all injury is the tackle.

When I rang up Martyn Thomas, the chairman of the Rugby Football Union, and told him that I didn't want my son playing the sport that my family has played and written about for 50 years, he said: "It is an area that concerns me. I do not know why we allow players to use padding that just serves to insulate them from the pain of the hit."

But far from banning the sort of padding that insulates the hit, the International Rugby Board actually licenses the stuff.

Fran Cotton, the former England and Lions prop, said: "The Premiership is just a war now. We've got to get rid of the shoulder-charge tackle and the spear tackle and taking people out in the air. We can do it by being really tough.

"Would you want to bridge over a ball so that anybody can come in at full tilt and wipe you out? No wonder there are so many injuries. A third of the Permiership squads are unavailable every weekend. In any other business it would be totally unacceptable."

One of the current sick notes is Phil Vickery. The England prop was helping out with mini rugby at the weekend. The kids must have been thrilled to see him. The mums and dads would have seen a rugby player about to undergo his third neck operation.

The good news is that the IRB is holding a medical conference next month and it sounds as if it genuinely wants to take action. One member said: "These tackles are dangerous and it's got to be stopped, but the IRB is addressing it. As soon as people start getting sent off, coaches will put a stop to it."

But can we really trust the IRB? In the 2005 series between the British and Irish Lions and New Zealand, Keven Mealamu and Tana Umaga picked up captain Brian O'Driscoll and threw him down headfirst in what is known as a 'spear tackle'. Neither player was punished.

Yet despite such craven inaction, the IRB now thinks it has wiped out spear tackling. Not at schoolboy level, it hasn't. Baker says: "I have a picture of a boy being spear tackled last season. Yet when he hit the ground he was penalised for not releasing the ball. I couldn't believe it."

It's the sort of tackle that can break a person's neck. A survey conducted between 2000 and 2003 on 125 young rugby players (average age 12.7) admitted to a Sydney hospital with head, neck and spine injuries, found that "hyperextension of the neck accounted for a third of all cases and was usually the result of a spear tackle".

The reality is that most dangerous tackles still get little more than a yellow card and school coaches feel powerless to halt this rise in dangerous play.

Baker says: "As coaches, if we walk on to the pitch and say we have to stop this, we will be banned.

"If I'm on the touchline and two youths are having a fight with the ref a long way away, I am instructed to leave them alone. If I go on as a coach I will be reported and banned. We are caught between the RFU's need to protect referees and our duty of care under the law."

We are all caught. Rugby is a great game to start early and up until the age of 15 it is relatively safe. But how can you then stop a boy from carrying on? How do you tell a lad who thinks he is immortal that rugby is just not worth getting smashed up for? How do you say: 'It's too dangerous?'